BoP Bridge...

So did Admiral Kirk and his renegade crew refit the bridge of their stolen BoP in their three month lay over on Vulcan or what?

The Bridge set from Kruge's BoP in SFS and Kirk's in TVH is very noticeable. In fact in STIV it is almost Federation-like in set-up with Klingon knobs and screens etc. compared to the previous.

What is the reasoning behind it via cannon or is it just kind of ignored?

 

I imagine the Vulcans helped.

 

Clearly, as you see all the Vulcan tech's with their Smurf headgear running about the BoP in the opening on Vulcan. lol

 

Canon, Cannon. I'm used to the ones that go "boom." lol

As far as the 'history' behind things I've learned more about the 'history of the future' on this site that I really knew was out there. lol I didn't know if their was tech manual or book out there that covered that topic.

 

It makes no sense for anybody non-Klingon to do such a drastic refit on the bridge and not replace the Klingon knobs with English or Vulcan ones in the process! No, the ST4 consoles and pulpits and whatnot had to preexist somehow.

So, the obvious explanation is that Kruge had two bridges. One for flying the ship, as seen in ST4, and another for doing some other stuff; several possibilities exist. Remember that Kruge seemed to be some sort of a spymaster operating deep within UFP space if necessary. He could have set up a special command center for his spy ops. Or the ST3 "bridge" could have been the main gunnery station. Or, since an important feature of the BoP (indeed, apparently a driving factor in its strange, prominently winged design) is its ability to land on planets, perhaps BoPs have a special command center for coordinating surface combat operations?

It's not all that unusual for small vessels to have multiple command locations. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the creation of a do-it-all nerve center is something more easily done when one has enough room, say, the room afforded by a medium-sized vessel. Thus, a small torpedo boat may need to divide its command functions so that the engines are commanded from the engine room, a separate gunnery control room exists for aiming the secondary weapons, another for the primary torpedoes, a belowdecks helm station handles the steering, and a separate bridge topside caters for sighting. A larger frigate may coordinate most of those things from a belowdecks room, leaving only the sighting function to the separate topside structure.

Timo Saloniemi

 

In an early script for ST IV, Kirk mentions that Scotty had nothing better to do, since "Vulcans don't have titty bars."

Joe, noted Trek historian

 

I would accept that as plausible. Lol

 

"Don't tell me you don't have titty bars in the 23rd Century."

"Well, we don't."

 

I never gave it any thought. I never thought it was any stranger than the refit Constitution class Enterprise having a different-looking bridge in all 6 movies (or the Ent-E's bridge looking different in all of the last 3, or the Generations bridge looking different from the TNG TV show). It's kind of a movie thing, it seems like.

 

Thats an interesting point. The only time when the bridges are nearly the same is betweem II and III.

Even then the displays are different, the lighting is different and there are large scorches on the turbolift doors that weren't there at the end of III

 

There were new bruises all over the ship at the Start of III you didn't see at the end of II. lol

Did Kirk and his now guiled crew pick some fights on their limp back to starbase? lol

 

As do I.

Also, there's the fact that the ST IV bridge had a direct hatch to the outside. The one in ST III does not. So that makes it even more likely that they aren't the same bridge. The ST III bridge was probably some kind of auxiliary control or 'battle bridge'.

 

As long as there are sandwiches in the future, I can survive (barely)without titty bars.

 

Given the layout of every post SFS BOP bridge, that HAS to be the case. They all look like the TVH VulcanRefitBoP, give or take a periscope or steering wheel.

 

Just curious is it the same same set just rehashed? Like they mothballed the IV set and yank it out for BoP filming?

 

More probably, the basic elements of the set (consoles and chairs and wall panels) are rearranged as needed by a specific episode or show. DS9 made a lot of use of Klingon interiors, so some sort of a semi-permanent Klingon bridge may have been built in the corner originally reserved for "alien bridges and corridors". But once that got torn down, each Klingon bridge set was probably built using different, customized scaffolding and lighting.

The ST3:TSfS bridge does have nice links to the preceding Klingon sets - the smooth bluish wall panels remind of the battle cruiser corridors of TOS, while the gunner's chair spinning on the background ties in to the two chairs of the TMP battle cruiser.

ENT shows us that the ST4 layout was all the vogue in the 22nd century already, though. So in that light, Kruge's blue dome more probably is something of a hiccup rather than a transitional step from some all-blue-cardboard style to the ST4-onwards look...

Perhaps Kruge indeed got his ship customized on Romulus, even though the Romulan connection is cut from the shot and aired version of the movie? Perhaps Romulans like to install bluish vanity covers on the walls of all the Klingon ships they receive, and Kruge either had a deal with them in the name of the putative Klingon-Romulan alliance - or stole back a Klingon ride that had already been partially pimped by Romulans.

Timo Saloniemi

 

The thing that SLAYS me about the sfs bridge is that colorful umbrella-looking thing up over Kruge's head. It looks more like something you'd see on the beach in THE PRISONER.

 

Well they do have 'em. They're just open once every seven years.